Look at the horse! No nobler and more beautiful creature is found in all the animal realm. A marvel of strength, speed and splendor. The most useful and most consummate associate of man. What wonderful possibilities of reciprocity! Man takes the horse from the plains, where he is exposed to the inclemencies of weather, the contingencies of food and the blunders of his own childlike nature. He gives him regular meals, pleasant shelter, intellectual surroundings, and a home. The horse in return gives man the benefit of his superior strength and speed, bearing man and his burdens and supplementing in a thousand ways the inadequate energies of his mentor. These are the possibilities, the ideal—gigantic strength supplementing superior wisdom. Beautiful reciprocity! What are the actualities? Sad, indeed! The horse is not an associate but a _slave_. He has no rights, and is seldom suspected of being entitled to feelings or vanities at all. He is treated as if he had merely existence and usefulness. He is neglected, overburdened and overworked, beaten, insulted, starved, maimed, misunderstood, deprived of leisure and liberty, unconsidered—doomed to an environment out of which has been drained every element calculated to promote his happiness and intelligence and perpetuate his nobility and beauty. He is a mere suggestion of the might-have-been. His regal neck has wilted; the splendid flanks are lean and drawn; the ambitious face is sad. The proud galloper of the plains, the companion of the winds, bearing fire in his nostrils and thunder in his hoofs, has become a soured, impoverished, broken-hearted but faithful _wreck_. The stars of heaven never looked down on a more pitiful sight than that of a horse, after having drudged all his days in the service of his lord, cast out in his helpless old age to wander and perish. Our own happiness and that of our species are believed to be so much more important than that of others that we sacrifice without scruple the most sacred prerogatives of others in order that our own may be fastidiously trimmed. Even for a tooth or a feather to wear on our vanity marauders are sent through the forests of the earth to ravage and depopulate them. Beautiful beings which fill the woods with song and juvenility are compelled to sprawl lifeless and disheveled on the skulls of unconscionable sillies. Criminal and inconvenient races are exterminated with eager and superfluous violence. Thousands of innocent and helpless souls are caught up and carried by unfeeling emissaries into foul dungeons and there doomed by ghoulish clowns of science to the most protracted, useless, and damning victimizations. It is enough almost to make villains weep—the cold-blooded manner in which human beings cut the throats, dash out the brains, and discuss the flavor of their victims at their cannibalistic feasts.